No, that doesn’t really capture it. To begin with, she’s a woman, not a girl. A really, really smart one.

More to the point, we met quite by accident, not on JDate or ashleymadison.com. It seems we both live in, and blog about Pondicherry. And we are both a little food-obsessed. So we started corresponding about these things.

Deepa Reddy is a cultural anthropologist by profession, an artist by natural talent and temperament, and a cook by passion. Her blog, Pâticheri, is a thing of beauty, thoughtfulness, and deliciousness. During one of our exchanges — about the semiotics of baking or some such thing — she suggested that it might be fun to take our “ethnographic free-play” public, to post our back-and-forth on our blogs in real-time. With you, Dear Reader, adding your own “deep play” (I promise, that will be my one-and-only cultural anthropology joke) in the comments, this might just be an interesting experiment.

After loosely settling on a topic — national identity and all-things-food — we have decided to let it rip. Let the wild rumpus begin!

Summer has been slow to reach the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, and the natives have been getting restless. While we are sweating our asses off in India all winter, they are slogging through cold, grey, short days. The folks here seem relived and excited, in equal measure, that the cloudless skies of summer finally seem to have arrived.

My major disappointment about the unseasonably cold June is that the blackberries, which grow in such profusion here, will be slow to ripen. Fortunately, the fabulous salmonberry is now ripe for the plucking.

This afternoon, under cool, grey skies, Yoo-Mi and Ellen rolled out the driveway on bicycle; and I launched a sea kayak from the beach in front of the house. Roughly an hour later, we rendezvoused on the dock at Granville Island, and began combing the aisleways of the Public Market for the makings of dinner.

Benoit is a century-and-a-half old, one-star take on classic bistro food. It’s beautiful, traditional (and traditionally cramped) dinning rooms and friendly wait-staff are the epitome of the genre; and the food, though uneven, is generally a cut above. Not every dish at our table was excellent, but mine were:

My travel over the 41 hours stretching from 7:00 am (IST) yesterday to 11:00 am (PDT) later today, breaks into four segments: Pondicherry to Madras, Madras to Bombay, Bombay to Seoul, and Seoul to San Francisco. So by the time I reached Bombay, I reckoned my journey was half over.

How better to celebrate – and spend some of my precious last 10 hours in Bombay – than with a liquid lunch.

I hear a lot of advice given about precautions one should take when visiting India. Most of that seems directed at protecting one from what Indians would call “loose motions.” It almost always involves abstinence, a concept that will never be incorporated into my behavioral vocabulary.

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